“Who is afraid of red yellow and green”

TIRANA, July 8 – The Promenade Gallery in the southern coastal city of Vlora has announced it will open Sunday, July 11, a contemporary art exhibition featuring works by six artists.
This exhibition consists of the works of some of those Albanian artists who are now working in an international context including Alban Muja, Adrian Paci, Anri Sala, Artan Shabani, Driant Zeneli, Fani Zguro. The exhibition is named after one of the works of Anri Sala, a short video called “Who Is Afraid of Red, Yellow and Green” (2008). In this video, the artist presents an unusual situation by focusing on a static plane, as spiders build their webs over a stoplight, without fearing the tension that the latter create.
Alban Muja, an artist working in Kosovo, participates with the photograph, “Catch Me” which he completed during his residency in Santa Fe Institution in 2008, a photo which portrays the artist running through the desert. The picture shows the moment in which the artist crosses the U.S.-Mexican border. Beyond the superficial impressions of a frivolous act, this carries in it a whole series of paradoxes and cultural peculiarities, as well as the big question about what freedom means in our time. For the Mexicans this free movement across the border is as restricted and controlled as it is for Alban Muja’s compatriots in Kosovo. In these paradoxes, the artist finds the true analogies of his own identity around the world and how to overcome them.
Meanwhile, artist Adrian Paci, with his video “Nobody is romantic anymore,” continues a search which he has started much earlier on the relationship between art and the positioning of the artist. The central object of Paci’s video is a real person, his friend, painter Ilir Zefi, who continues to cultivate a romantic idea on the role of the artist as well as art production. However, the capacity for irony, auto-irony and melancholy, combined with a critical sense, do not allow the protagonist of the video to become pathetic.
Artan Shabani, presents two photographs, “The Singing Lions,” whose focus is the dialectics between the influence and consumption of architecture by human beings. The music within nature, like frame of history. And yet, ephemeral signifier for the time, already evicted from nature monument of the dethroned moment, memory’s rust on history. Lacking the shape of any natural object, the memory lives like a parasite within the evoking sound and the sound retransfers within nature the history (the past) along with contingent projects of objects, the missing bodies (or which are not the same)
Another artist, Driant Zeneli, presents the video, “‘The dream of Icarus was to make a cloud’. An action – the creation of a small cloud, something that happens millions of times on earth – is almost impossible without sophisticated aeronautical equipment. However, Zeneli considers it fundamental to try, to share with the spectator a dream similar to that of Icarus. Boarded on a paraglider, the artist creates a cirrus cloud that lasts a few seconds before dissolving with the mountain wind. At that point, the paraglider is already off-camera and no traces remain of the artist and the utopia he wished to give us.
Fani Zguro, presents his photograph “To divide it,” which highlights the past, for example, how adolescents, because they had no money would transform a cigarette into a ruler so as to equally divide it amongst themselves.
The exhibition “Who Is Afraid of Red Yellow and Green” will be open to the public until September 14, 2010 at the Promenade Gallery, situated in the Skele- Uji i Ftohte boulevard of Vlora.